Air-Powered, Star-Trek-Inspired Sliding Door for DIY Geeks

Star Trek has featured a great deal of tech over the years that eventually came to pass – consider the iPad, for instance – but one of the neatest features, perfect for any geek domicile, has not been widely adopted: the automatic, two-piece sliding doors.

Complete with a nifty futuristic swooshing-air sound, this do-it-yourself Instructables project by uiproductions has it all – powered by compressed air, no less (so no, the sound is not fake!).

At the same time, though, its creator wanted something that would look conventional enough for a traditional early-21st-Century domicile. Thus, a normal 32-inch door was cut in half and coupled with a pocket door track.

While there is a push-button to open it once (after which it closes automatically moments later) as well as a key-to-keep-open option, one could wish for a final Star-Trekked aspect – motion detection – to make it complete. Then again, in the shows, even that did not always work …